Search

Abstract This article provides a commentary on Thomas Grund’s International Conference on Computational Social Science 2021 keynote “Dynamics of Denunciation: The Limits of a Scandal”. The keynote presents results from research investigating the relational dynamics underpinning the denunciations provided in testimonies relating to a Canadian political scandal. Grund uses relational event models to test hypotheses about the social mechanisms driving the denunciations. Although denunciation should depend only on who is guilty and not on who has said what up to that point, Grund’s study finds evidence in support of a number of relational mechanisms influencing the denunciation process. Grund argues that the apparent influence of past denunciations on testimonies reveals the limits of the inquiry process itself and what it can reveal about a scandal. This article reviews Grund’s talk and puts the work in a broader context of using approaches rooted in event history modelling and social network theory to illuminate the processes defining social interaction data. It highlights ways in which the keynote can inform the development of computational social science approaches to analysing such data, and argues that the value of such an analysis has implications for scholarship beyond the social sciences.

In the second half of 2022, the Japanese political world was shaken by a major scandal: in July 2022, former Prime Minister and a prominent member of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party Abe Shinzō was killed at an election rally. The assassin, caught at the crime scene, declared that the murder was a revenge for the victim’s connection with the Unification Church, which, according to the perpetrator’s words, had led his family to financial ruin. Initially, this explanation seemed fantastical, but the investigation that followed revealed that both Abe Shinzō himself and many other Japanese politicians had been maintaining connections with the Unification Church for many years. This caused an uproar in Japanese society, especially given the rather controversial reputation of the Unification Church. On January 26, 2023, the Association of Japanologists and the research laboratory “Center for Japanese, Korean, and Mongolian Studies” of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO University) held a roundtable “Unification Church in Japan as a Sociocultural and Political Phenomenon”. The participants of the roundtable analyzed the situation around the Unification Church and its role in Japanese politics in detail, studied the specific features of the “new religions” in Japanese society, and considered the factors determining their influence on the political world of Japan.

In analyzing the distinction between flak and scandal, this investigation focuses on the discourse around Solyndra in 2011–2012 on two media platforms. Solyndra was a solar panel firm that went bankrupt after receiving American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (‘The Stimulus’) funds. The analysis shows that National Review—a rightwing journal of opinion that increasingly operates as an online platform—unswervingly utilized the Solyndra bankruptcy as an instrument of political combat. Following flak lines rehearsed by Republicans in congressional hearings, National Review narrated Solyndra as scandalous evidence of the Obama administration’s putative ineptitude and/or criminality that, moreover, discredited the efficacy of green energy. The performance of the mainstream newspaper The Washington Post presented a grab-bag mix as its objective methods insinuated flak packaged as scandal into stories when they followed Republican talking points. At the same time, The Washington Post’s discourse noted that no evidence of administration corruption was discovered despite extensive investigation and that government intervention into the economy is often highly beneficial.

Crisis Communication: models and case studies. We often read of crises or scandals involving companies and governments. Nonetheless, the study of the phenomenon is still not very investigated or limited to cases of social denunciation. The aim of this report is to overcome the static model, news and consequent scandal, by analyzing the structure of a crisis and the dynamics involving key stakeholders, the media and the public opinion. The analysis tells us that the parts collide, splitting the public, both on the newspapers and the social media. The new proposed model is confirmed by four case studies, both political and corporate. These are, in order: Barilla. No pro-gay commercials, Nestlé and horse meat, the call of Vendola to Archinà, Cancellieri and the case Ligresti. Case analysis was performed on a sample of six national newspapers, noting each article of reference to the case. The survey of public sentiment was carried out by tools for social media marketing quantitatively and qualitatively

The 2017 U.S. Senate Special Election in Alabama, which was decided on 12 December 2017, was one of the most contentious and scandal-laden political campaigns in recent memory. The Republican candidate, Roy Moore, gained notoriety during the 2017 campaign when a number of women alleged to national media that as teenagers they were subject to sexual advances by Moore, who was then in his early 30s and serving as a local assistant district attorney. The process and results of this particular election provide the heretofore unexamined impact of political scandal on localism or friends-and-neighbors voting in political contests. Based on data from the 2017 special election in Alabama, econometric results presented here suggest that a candidate who is embroiled in political scandal suffers an erosion in the usual friends-and-neighbors effect on his or her local vote share. In this particular case, the scandal hanging over Moore eroded all of the friends-and-neighbors effect that would have been expected (e.g., about five percentage points) in his home county, as well as about 40% of the advantage Moore had at home over his opponent in terms of constituent political ideology.